nerzhin

Have you tried this? Does it work?

I don't understand much of this, and I want to, so let me start by asking basic questions in a much simpler setting.

We are playing Conway's game of life with some given initial state. An disciple AI is given a 5 by 5 region of the board and allowed to manipulate its entries arbitrarily - information leaves that region according to the usual rules for the game.

The master AI decides on some algorithm for the disciple AI to execute. Then it runs the simulation with and without the disciple AI. The results can be compared directly - by, for example, count... (read more)

The first requirement:

Even as chicks, geese cannot be handled by a human, or encounter other geese who have been.

suggests that a FAI would not tell us that it exists. In other words, the singularity may already have happened.

You can pay someone $8/hr to do menial tasks 20 hrs/ week, for a total of about $8000 / year.

With payroll taxes and insurance, I would expect this to cost at least $12000 a year.

Sure, but you could have a limit on how many rounds back they remember, or you could fill in the history with some rule.

Or just prohibit the bots from knowing which round they are playing.

It is not at all clear that the people resistant to addictive drugs are reproducing at a higher rate than those who aren't.

I think the sub-proposal is too complex and involves too many trivial inconveniences. I up-voted the original proposal.

almost every researcher in CS flaunts copyright, posting their papers on their own websites

Many journals explicitly allow you to distribute a "preprint" of your journal articles on your personal website. For example, the Elsevier policy states that authors retain:

the right to post a pre-print version of the journal article on Internet websites including electronic pre-print servers, and to retain indefinitely such version on such servers or sites for scholarly purposes

There are open access journals. I recommend supporting them.

Another way of saying this (I think - Vladimir_M can correct me):

You only have two choices. You can be the kind of person who kills the fat mat in order to save four other lives and kills the fat man in order to get a million dollars for yourself. Or you can be the kind of person who refuses to kill the fat man in both situations. Because of human hardware, those are your only choices.

There are three things you could want:

1. You could want the extra dollar. ($6 instead of $5)

2. You could want to feel like someone who care about others.

3. You could genuinely care about others.

The point of the research in the post, if I understand it, is that (many) people want 1 and 2, and often the best way to get both those things is to be ignorant of the actual effects of your behavior. In my view a rationalist should decide either that they want 1 (throwing 2 and 3 out the window) or that they want 3 (forgetting 1). Either way you can know the truth and still win.

Here is a presentation that was used in a similar setting before.

I recommend trying to cover less than you currently plan. Just one or two big ideas should be more than enough.

Donating to VillageReach signals philanthropic intention and affords networking opportunities with other people who care about global welfare who might be persuaded to work against x-risk

Also, donating to VillageReach saves people's lives, and those people will have agency and abilities and may very well contribute to existential risk reduction.

How did this go over with your advisor? (Serious question.)

Nowadays, however, the class system has become far harsher and the distribution of status much more skewed. The better-off classes view those beneath them with frightful scorn and contempt, and the underclass has been dehumanized to a degree barely precedented in human history.

How do you measure this kind of thing? Do you have a citation?

I'm not sure I believe you. By "non-wage costs and risks" do you mean things like health benefits, or lawsuit liability, or what? I can think of a lot of productive uses for cheap labor.

There's a bunch of trash and graffiti in my city. There's lots of unemployed people whose labor cleaning it up would be worth, say, a euro an hour.

Your (funny) comment made me realize that ubiquitous smartphones and the right software might actually make something like a karma system for in-person conversations possible.

If you have to pick one of the above ideas as most useful, which would it be?

The general idea sounds a lot like pair programming.